Cohen's talk, "Critical Encounters With Architecture", will discuss the role of exceptional forms in architecture, which have historically oscillated between, on the one hand, the representation of power and prestige and on the other hand, the production of spectacle for popular consumption. Cohen's aim has been to explore a new role. By making unusually formed spaces the centerpieces of important cultural and educational institutions, the actions of users and interventions of different authors have the effect of being disruptive and transformative, and therefore critical of architecture itself.

Experimental architecture is an alternative to mainstream building production. It takes advantage of the contemporary tools of parametric design, robotic systems and synthetic biology. It is directly connected to development of technologies and materials. Experimental architecture designs are characterized by multiformity, plasticity and natural tectonics.

The Source Books in Architecture series documents the work of the Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professors at the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture. Cohen was the 2014 Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Cohen joins a long list of prominent practitioners and scholars as Baumer Professors since the program’s inception in 1996, including Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman and last year's Baumer Professor, Neil Denari. During the course of their time at Knowlton, Baumer Professors lead a graduate design seminar and present a public lecture as part of the School’s Baumer Lecture Series.

The LEED-Gold-certified, 36,000 square foot building opened at a great moment for the school. Recently appointed Dean Jonathan Massey delivered the celebratory speech and his inaugural lecture, "Building Tomorrow"

About the building, Massey said: "Taubman College is famous for our robot-filled fabrication labs and our wide-open studio floor. The A. Alfred Taubman Wing and renovation augments these assets with a faculty research hub and a glorious two-story commons that allows the entire college to gather for lectures, studio reviews, and social events. We are excited to form new living and learning relationships within its complex, carefully considered and sumptuously daylit spaces."

The renovation is the first modification to the Art and Architecture Building, designed by Robert Swanson, since its completion in 1974. Former Taubman Dean Monica Ponce de Leon, who spoke at the opening, led the enormously exciting process that finally successfully concluded the effort to add to the building, an effort which began in 2009.

Designed by Preston Scott Cohen Inc. (Preston Scott Cohen and Carl Dworkin), of Cambridge, Mass in association with architect of record, Integrated Design Solutions, the new building sets the stage for new forms of collaboration between the Planning and Architecture Programs.

The interior space of the addition is organized by a series of spiral-like stairs and ramps that create perambulatory sequences designed to create encounters between faculty and students. Externally, a saw-tooth roof reflects warm light, unifying the orthogonal geometry of the studio with the hexagonal, ramped commons. An exterior plaza links the new building with the existing one, providing an outside gathering space to foster community. Structural improvements, including an updated HVAC system and a new roof, upgrade the existing building.

As part of the festivities, research projects by assistant professors in both architecture and urban planning are on display in the plaza and the entryway to the new building, including work by: Sean Ahlquist, T+E+A+M (Thom Moran, Ellie Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith Miller), Tsz Yan Ng, Ana Morcillo Pallares, Jonathan Rule, all assistant professors of architecture; and Harley Etienne, Robert Goodspeed, Lesli Hoey, Kimberley Kinder and Ana Paula Pimentel Walker, all assistant professors of urban planning.

The Parrish Art Museum is launching a new series where architects can exchange ideas and insights with leading practitioners and thinkers from myriad disciplines and propose design solutions for cultural, infrastructural, environmental, social, and geopolitical challenges.

"Inter-Sections: The Architect in Conversation" brings together diverse voices, communities, and interest groups concerned with building and designing for a vibrant and sustainable future on the East End and beyond.

Preston Scott Cohen, who recently designed the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, talked with Director Terrie Sultan, who oversaw the new building by Herzog + de Meuron, about considerations when building for art—including cultural context and tensions, audiences and collections, as well as new roles of museums and unconventional approaches to presenting art. The talk was followed by a signing of Cohen’s book Lightfall: Genealogy of a Museum: Paul and Herta Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Since its completion in 2011, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art Amir Building has captured the attention of renowned architects, architecture students, architectural theorists and historians, artists, and journalists around the world.

Lightfall: Genealogy of a Museum is the first comprehensive compendium to combine the drawings, photographs and theories of the architectural and museological concepts of the project. Its 160 pages include graphic material, photographs and descriptive texts, generated during the design and construction processes by Cohen’s office in Cambridge and Tel Aviv, and essays by Preston Scott Cohen, Carl Dworkin, Amit Nemlich, Peter Eisenman, Sylvia Lavin, Robert Levit, Antoine Picon, and Daniel Sherer.

Each essay assesses the building within a specific discursive context. For example, in her essay, “Surface Activation”, Sylvia Lavin narrates the building’s geometry as a locus of debate about the role of architecture in museums today. In contrast, Preston Scott Cohen’s essay, “Museum as Genealogy”, argues that the building is a summation of historical museum and exhibition space typologies from the picture gallery and the cabinet of curiosities to the diorama and the continuous promenade exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim. In his essay, “The Historicity of the Modern”, Daniel Sherer claims that the Amir Building is the latest in a series of catalytic exemplars that establish modernity as a project based on history. Robert Levit places the Amir Building within a broader trajectory of formal, computationally based experiments that have re-shaped architectural culture since the early 1990s. Picon discusses the project's impact on the contemporary dialectic between architecture and the city.